The Application Of MI Theory To Comic Composition In High School English Writing Class

In learning and using a foreign language, all four skills–listening, speaking, readingand writing, play important roles. But in China’s current foreign language teaching practice,reading has been dominating the first place, followed by listening and speaking; at the end ofthe list is writing. On the one hand, writing ability is more difficult than other skills forlearners; on the other, writing teaching is a big challenge to the teacher. From surveying theexisting literature on the teaching of English writing and visiting a number of middle schools,I find that most schools don’t even have a special writing course. For those who have,teachers are always making students recite some sentences or exemplar writings to fill up awriting practice, which is greatly damaging learners’ writing interest and motivation. A goodwriting course should facilitate learners to express true feeling and thinking and good writingis a resonance between the writer and the writing materials.This paper, guided by the theory of multiple intelligences, aims at improving the qualityof writing teaching and arousing learners’ interest in English writing. Comic, as a form thatstudents love to see and hear, is introduced to English writing class in this empirical study. Itis designed to stimulate students’ multiple intelligences in the form of team cooperation,seeking a new way of improving students’ English writing.Then this paper introduces the problem of the study, methods and significance. Thisstudy, aims to answer the following two questions:First, based on the theory of multiple intelligences, can the comic writing teaching canstimulate students’ interest and motivation in writing?Second, based on the theory of multiple intelligences, can the comic writing teachingcan improve students’ writing ability and grades?To test the effectiveness of this method, the researcher selected two parallel classes of Wenshui County Middle School. The experiment was performed in a semester. At first, bothclasses were given a pretest to learn about their writing level and attitude towards Englishwriting. In this experiment, one class adopted traditional teaching of writing, and the otherclass adopted comic-based teaching of writing. After the experiment, SPSS18.0was used toanalyze the results of pre-test and post-test. Together with the means of interviews, studentsof experimental class showed a significant progress in interest and scores. However,comparative class had no significant change.There is little research on applying comic to English writing class in the domesticteaching circle. I hope that this study can provide a new practice of English writing teaching.